Beril Sönmez

Beril Sönmez holds a BA degree in Psychological Counseling and an MA degree in Cultural Studies from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. 

Participatory artistic practices in urban public space and the transformative power of the arts through citizen engagement have been her main interests since her MA studies, which pulled her to work in the intersection of urban studies and socially engaged arts. She worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University for seven years. She explored different forms of gentrification, displacement, and dispossession of communities at risk around Santralistanbul campus as well as in other neighborhoods of İstanbul. She has also been actively involved in activist collectives, including "Refugees–We Are–Neighbours". In this context, she specifically focused on practices of community building through place-making and on solidarity networks between refugees and non-refugees in peripheral neighborhoods of Istanbul.

She started to work with Anadolu Kültür in 2017 and since 2022, she has been the program coordinator responsible for the Department of Cultural Artistic Expression and Learning Programs. She has coordinated projects such as "German-Turkish Initiative for Collaboration on Refugee Relief", "Yeniden: Community-Based Resilience and Psychosocial Support through Arts in the Earthquake Regions", and "Connect for ImpAct: Local Collaborations for Anti-Discrimination between Municipalities, Civil Society and Cultural Organizations". Across these projects, her main objective has been to foster multi-sectoral local and cross-border collaborations to combat discrimination, promote cultural diversity and linguistic plurality, and advance social justice, inclusion, equity, and diversity through the arts.